Dressed in a black suit, a bolo tie, and piebald python cowboy boots, Arturo clomped toward the casket to pay his respects to Gaetano’s mother, accompanied by his wife, who wore a black dress. Arturo made the sign of the cross at the coffin.
“That is a beautiful dress,” Arturo told Gaetano, motioning to Maria’s dress.
“Yes,” said Gaetano.
“She rests in peace.”
“Wait here with me here, Arturo. We’re getting ready to leave.”
“Sí, patrón.”
“Is my SUV parked in front of the church?”
“Sí, patrón. This is a perfect wake. You do everything the right way. Your mother would approve,” said Arturo, watching the procession of grave visitors pass Maria’s coffin, some of the women genuflecting and crossing themselves.
“She had a lot of friends.”
“She looks so young lying there. It’s not right she left us so early.”
“Let’s leave now.”
Gaetano gathered his family and headed down the nave’s aisle to the vestibule.
As he left the vestibule and stood at the head of the concrete steps that led to the sidewalk, he spotted his black Chevy Suburban parked at the foot of the steps. Wearing black suits five of his bodyguards were standing at the church entrance waiting for him.
Gaetano nodded at them.
The five bodyguards descended the steps. Gaetano and his family followed the better part of ten feet behind them.
Its windows open, a silver Dodge Durango SUV drove at speed down the street in front of the church and pulled to a screeching halt.
The barrels of two AK-47s stuck out the windows and sprayed bullets at the church.
The five bodyguards tore semiautomatic pistols from their shoulder rigs and returned fire. Two of the bodyguards toppled down the steps, riddled with 7.62 mm bullets from the AKs.
Guests entering the church to attend the wake screamed and fled for cover inside the church. A young mother running for her life was felled by whistling bullets and crumpled on the cement steps.
Gripping Juan’s hand Gaetano charged down the steps to the cover of his bulletproof Suburban. Arturo whipped out a Glock 19 from his rear waistband and opened fire on the attackers in the Durango. Carmen raced down the steps after Gaetano. The bodyguard that was pushing Javier’s wheelchair did his best to push the wheelchair down the steps to reach the cover of the Suburban as fast as possible.
Bullets raked the steps and the crowd gathered at the church’s entrance, ricocheting off the cement risers helter-skelter. Screaming, the crowd surged through the church’s open doors into the church seeking shelter.
Another bodyguard fell, the front of his button-down white shirt slashed with bloody bullet wounds. Dropping his MAC-10 he crumpled on the steps.
The bodyguard steering Javier down the steps took a bullet in his throat. He released his hold on Javier’s wheelchair, stabbing his hand to his throat to grasp the bullet-shredded flesh and stanch the bleeding. The runaway wheelchair clattered down the steps. Staring ahead in fright, Javier grappled to take control of the wheelchair as it bounced precariously down the steps, threatening to tip over any second.
Arturo emptied his pistol at the Durango as it screeched away from the church.
An AK-47 protruding from one of the Durango’s windows pelted Gaetano’s Suburban with slugs. Gnashing his teeth Gaetano hunkered down behind the Suburban.
The silver Durango rocketed away.
Furious, hearing the vehicle leave, Gaetano bolted to his feet to watch it bug out.
“Zetas,” he exploded, his fists balled at his sides. “They have no respect.”
Bridling his temper he looked down at his side. “Juan, are you OK?”
“Yes, Papa,” said Juan, standing five feet from him, looking up at him.
Gaetano breathed a sigh of relief. He looked up at the steps that led to the church. A bloodbath met his eyes.
Slick with blood, the cement steps were strewn with the bloody corpses of churchgoers and his bodyguards sprawled on the treads.
Javier’s bent wheelchair had crashed into the side of the Suburban. He sat motionless in it, his torso hanging over one of the cushioned armrests.
Gaetano hurried to tend to him.
“Papa, are you OK?” he said, righting Javier and the twisted wheelchair that was canted against the Suburban.
Javier fluttered his eyes open.
Carmen ran to Gaetano’s side and held him.
“They can’t get away with this,” she told him, staring into his eyes, her face determined.
Gaetano nodded, jaw set.
Chapter 92
Brody drove his Mini to Hollywood, leaving Deirdre and her family in the safe hands of Victor.
Driving up the winding Sunset Boulevard toward the strip in the night, he realized he was starting to have feelings for Terri. She was bringing him out of the dark box he had descended into after his wife’s murder at the hands of a serial killer. Brody had cut himself off from women after his wife’s death. He didn’t want to start having feelings for another woman so soon after losing Jennifer.
He couldn’t cut himself off from his feelings forever. He couldn’t allow himself to drop down the rabbit hole of isolation. Maybe there would be another Jennifer. Maybe it was Terri.
But then again, maybe it was just a physical attraction, or chemical, as Jennifer used to call it. After all, he wasn’t immune to a pretty woman sliding up and down his thighs doing a lap dance.
He thought Lyndon was victimizing her, demanding sex from her in exchange for interviews and auditions with producers—if she could be believed. He saw no reason to doubt her. He didn’t trust Lyndon. But was he as bad as everyone claimed? Was he a traitor to the country, like Peltz claimed? Or was he a rapist and a pimp, as Terri claimed? Was he cheating on his wife, as Deirdre suspected? Did he have anything to do with Rakowski’s murder in Cabo? Or was he just another guy trying to make a living?
Brody reached the Convent and found a space in the parking lot. He parked, killed the Mini’s engine, and called Terri on his cell. She didn’t answer. He secreted his SIG and his shoulder rig in the Mini’s glove compartment.
He entered the Convent, his ears drubbed by a cascade of rock. Trussed up in a black suit, looking uncomfortable, a cropped Hispanic bouncer with a bodybuilder’s physique and a black eye patch over one eye frisked him and let him pass to the bored cashier, who accepted Brody’s payment of the cover charge with a yawn.
Brody scouted the dim-lit strip joint for Terri. He didn’t see her anywhere. A cloud of tobacco smoke drifted toward him. A brunette was working the pole on the stage, letting it slide between her oily thighs as she lowered herself down it.
He signaled to a buxom waitress who had a blonde pageboy do and was dressed in a pink bikini.
“Is Terri here?” he said.
“She’s in a private room with a customer.”
“I want to speak to her.”
“She’s all booked up for tonight,” she said, and made to break away from him.
“This is personal.”
“She’s leaving after her lap dance. She leaves through the back entrance. Wait out in the back for her.”
She resumed mingling with the patrons sitting at the tables who were grinning with open mouths at the stripper gyrating onstage.
Brody knew lap-dance routines didn’t last long. He left by the front entrance and circled around to the back, where grease-mottled Big Mac wrappers, empty paper cups, and used rubbers littered the asphalt. The litterbugs were too lazy to use the nearby green metal Dumpster.
He stood ten-odd feet from the back door so he wouldn’t miss her as she exited. He could hear the heavy metal rock thumping inside the joint. Overhead, mountains of deep purple clouds were gathering in the sky in murky silence.
He found himself excited at the thought of seeing her again. He would wait to meet Jennifer with the same feeling of tingling anticipation when she was alive.
However, Terri was younger than Jennifer. Why did that matter? he asked himself. Why must age be a barrier—unless she was under the age of consent? And she wasn’t. She had already told him she was over eighteen.
He heard the occasional car whoosh by in the alley behind the joint.
He wondered how long he had been standing here. What if she exited via the front entrance? What if the waitress had forgot to tell Terri he was waiting outside in the back for her? But the waitress had said Terri always left via the back door, which meant the waitress didn’t have to tell Terri he was waiting for her. He was bound to see Terri when she left the joint.
He hoped he wouldn’t attract attention loitering out here. He didn’t see anyone else in the back. He had the place to himself, save for a black cat that was skulking around the Dumpster sniffing it with curiosity.
Jennifer liked cats, he recalled. He liked them, too. But he was too lazy to get one and take care of it. And he didn’t want anything to get in the way of his job. Maybe the black cat sensed this, for it gave him a dirty look with its green eyes.
He heard screaming accompanying the thundering rock in the joint beyond the door. The customers were evidently having a good time, he decided. He could see and hear the back door vibrating in its jamb.
The door burst open.
Chapter 93
Wearing frayed denim short shorts Terri staggered out of the strip joint, blood jetting ten feet in the air from the carotid artery in her throat and splattering on the asphalt. Her chiffon blouse drenched with fresh blood, she was clutching at a crossbow bolt that had penetrated her carotid as it had thrust through the soft tissue of her throat.
Brody rushed over to her as she stumbled forward.
With a severed artery she would bleed out in minutes without medical help, he knew. He grabbed her to prevent her from falling and tried to stanch her wound with his fingers. Blood continued to spurt out of her throat, seeping through the interstices between his fingers. Unable to stop the bleeding, he laid her on her back on the asphalt, fished his smartphone out of his trouser pocket, punched 911, and told the dispatcher the nature of the emergency and his location.
“When will you get here?” said Brody.
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Make it five.”
“We’ll do our best, mister.”
Brody terminated the call in dejection. He didn’t think she would last fifteen minutes. She was already on the verge of blacking out and she had lost lots of blood.
He squatted on his haunches beside her and lifted her head from the pavement.
“Who did this to you?” he said.
She tried to speak, but no words came out of her mouth. Her unfocused eyes rolled in her head. He whipped his handkerchief out of his rear trouser pocket, shook it out, and wrapped it around her bleeding throat. He didn’t see how to secure it. Spotting a bobby pin in her hair he snatched it from one of her locks and used it as a crude clasp to keep the handkerchief from falling off. He doubted the bobby pin would hold very long, but he had to try to catch the guy that had done this to her.
He bolted to the door, twisted its knob, and flung it open, greeted by screams of delight from the patrons out of sight in the main room. He didn’t see anyone in the back of the joint with a crossbow. He didn’t see anyone, for that matter. The private lap-dancing rooms were occupied on both sides of the hall where he stood, their doors shut.
He pelted into the nightclub’s main room to see if he could spot anyone wielding a crossbow. Leering patrons hooted and whistled at the well-endowed stripper dancing and shedding her clothes on the stage to his side, bumping and grinding to the swelling music. He saw no sign of a crossbow.
“Did anyone see a guy with a crossbow?” he cried.
Nobody paid any attention to him. Either they couldn’t hear him thanks to the deafening music or they were too engrossed with the bare-chested stripper with jutting breasts to notice him.
On a hunch he retreated and flung open the door to the nearest private lap-dancing room. Startled at the sight of him, a teenage brunette Korean lap dancer, who was sliding along a black guy’s lap, screamed.
“Sorry,” said Brody, and closed the door.
He checked the other private room.
The back of a brunette’s head was bobbing up and down in a middle-aged guy’s lap as she knelt between his naked hairy legs and he moaned in pleasure with his eyes closed.
Brody shut the door.
The attacker must have escaped through the front entrance, he decided. He didn’t want to leave Terri alone in her condition. He returned to her side, kneeling over her.
She had already passed out, her face ashen and cold, his handkerchief collaring her throat soaked through with her blood. He pressed the handkerchief tighter to the wound to try to stop the bleeding, which was petering out due to a decrease in blood pressure from her diminishing heartbeat.
He felt for the pulse in her neck. If it was there, it was so faint he could barely detect it under his fingertips.
Where was the ambulance? he wondered, face sweating. What was taking them so long?
He felt helpless. What more could he do to help her? he wondered.
Crestfallen, he knew it was too late. Still, he held his blood-saturated handkerchief to her throat, hoping against hope.
It was his fault. He was a jinx. He ought to wear a warning sign around his neck in red letters: If You Value Your Life, Don’t Get Involved with Me. Not that he believed in karma or in fate or in any of that kind of nonsense. The way he saw it, things just happened, not because you were good or evil. There wasn’t any rhyme or reason to them. He couldn’t buy a break. That was all.
He had started to like her and had rolled a pair of snake eyes, and she had to pay with her life. He cursed himself in silence. He should have kept his feelings separate from his job. It was Jennifer all over again.
Silently urging the ambulance to arrive, he watched over Terri as her life guttered out.
He never wanted to go though this agony again.
A homeless, unshaven drunk shambled along the perimeter of the parking lot, muttering and chuckling to himself, stinking of booze and unwashed clothes, stains on his rumpled baggy pants.
Hardly any blood was leaking from Terri’s throat, Brody noticed. He felt her pulse. Nothing.
He heard an ambulance.
He decided to leave. He didn’t want to spend the rest of the night interrogated by cops. Deirdre’s life could be in danger. The archer might go after her again, since he hadn’t got what he wanted from Terri. Or had he? Maybe, like Brody, all the guy had wanted from her was information. Which he might have gotten . . . and it might be leading him back to Deirdre’s.
Since a crossbow bolt was embedded in Terri’s neck, Brody figured the killer was the same guy that had fired the two bolts into Deirdre’s living room. The guy might return with reinforcements to Deirdre’s.
Brody bugged out. He had to get back to her. He didn’t have time to mourn for Terri, or he might end up with another death on his hands.
Bummed out by Terri’s death, he climbed into his Mini, fired the ignition, backed out of his space, and pulled out of the parking lot, bound for Deirdre’s.
Chapter 94
Marcello was eating a hard taco at a taco joint on Hollywood Boulevard.
He hadn’t wanted to kill Terri, but she had refused to give him the information he wanted. She hadn’t told him where it was. He had to kill her to cover his tracks. She could ID him to the cops. He didn’t want the cops to know anything about him. He didn’t even want them to know he was in the country. The capo crimine would be furious if he heard that Marcello had revealed himself to the cops.
Marcello hadn’t killed her with the crossbow. He never could have gotten it past the bouncer at the entrance to the Convent. He had stabbed Terri in the neck with a bolt he had hidden up his sleeve, which the bouncer had failed to detect.
He had stabbed her when she had refused to tell him where i
t was. She had claimed she didn’t know what “it” was. He couldn’t let her live because she might rat him out.
Crunching on his taco Marcello decided the suitcase had to be at the Foxes’ villa, which was what he had originally surmised. He had had to flee their premises when the bodyguard had surprised him and nearly shot him. The bodyguard wasn’t supposed to be there.
His plans knocked into a cocked hat, Marcello had fled.
He realized he was killing only women. He had wounded one prostitute in her lush white thigh and killed the other for the sake of art, making her beautiful body immortal. Terri’s death had nothing to do with art. It was business. It wasn’t that Marcello disliked women. He put them on a pedestal and thought the most beautiful art contained women as models—like the ones in Modigliani’s paintings of nudes.
He had worshiped the ground his first girlfriend walked on. A year after their relationship had begun, a Camorra thug had raped and killed her. When Marcello had found out the identity of the rapist, he had hunted the guy down, gutted him with a hunting knife, strewn twenty feet of his steaming, ribboning entrails on the ground, and stomped on them like he was trying to kill a boa constrictor as the terrified bastard watched him in agony, trying to gather his entrails back into his stomach, his life ebbing away, pleading with Marcello to stop. Marcello had been surprised at how long it had taken the rapist to die.
Banishing the rapist from his mind, Marcello munched his taco, savoring it. It was a good taco. It was the little things in life, like food, that made life worth living. He derived fulfillment from creating art, but he derived tantalizing pleasure from the taste of scrumptious food on its way to filling his belly. The little things . . .
The little things . . . like details, he decided. Was there something he was missing when it came to finding the suitcase? Had he overlooked a detail? It must be at the Foxes’ villa, though Fox’s stripper client Terri had been unable to confirm it before she had died. She had said she didn’t know anything about the suitcase he was asking about. She had no idea where it was. He couldn’t tell if she was lying.
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